Life Irrepressible

 

This  poem captures the struggles of flowers like this brilliantly, and also the struggles of lichens which I have referred to before. It's from a book called Campfire of the Heart, by Noel Davies. Wish I'd written it.

Life irrepressible

green shoots on charred lives

tears that break a drought

a tree rooted in a sheer rock face

grass, its will to thrive

breaking through new bitumen

weeds along the path

that continue to flourish

in the cracks

long after you and I

have passed by

Some fell upon stony ground

Poppy seeds, smaller than grains of sand, lodge in cracks and stay in their tomb until the spring rains wash away the stone of their dormancy and they rise in glorious colour.

Seaweed-eating sheep at the top of the world

These are some of the seaweed-eating sheep of North Rondaldsay mentioned in the last posting. Flocks are owned by islanders, kept for their wool and meat. They are restricted to the beach area by a thirteen kilometer stone wall (dyke), built around the whole island, where they graze on the abundant seaweed washed ashore in storms; this apparently gives the flesh a characteristic taste. Only at lambing time are the ewes brought into the fields to graze on richer feed.
The sheep are thought to have been on the island for thousands of years and are a pure strain of the ancient Neolithic Soay variety. They are quite small and have a wild playful look about them, a bit like goats, and coarse wool in a range of colours. The ewes all lamb within a few days of each other (these were due to lamb within a few weeks), a sign of their close genetic ties and unbroken line of descent. The images show their squat little bodies and skinny legs and the wonderful shades of their wool - they look as ancient and at home as the granite lichen-covered rocks.
Many animal owners on Orkney islands and on Shetland keep their stock inside great barns from about November until March, but the North Ron farmers I spoke to were disdainful of this practice. The seaweed-eating sheep stay in the wild all year round, as apparently do the beautiful Aberdeen Angus cattle that are also kept on the island. The conditions, I gather are a bit tempered by the Gulf Stream.

It is an interesting experience to follow sheep tracks in the sand and glimpse sheep in the shallows and amongst the rock pools, as if they are going surfing, and to see them scampering away along a sandy beach, and clambering like goats up rocky cliffs.
The third image shows their field at the top of a cliff, with the vast North Sea stretching away forever in the background.
 

Ask the Sheer Silence

I asked the wind,
whose breath hovered over the first waters,
how to pray
and it sang a  sparkling, starlit song.

My soul trembled
when I questioned the quaking earth,
And the stone rolled away from my heart.

Volcanoes and cascading waterfalls
poured forth hidden treasure
from within.

Leaves aflame with splendour
danced and leapt their reply
when I questioned the burning bush,
and I was consumed.

A pillar of cloud at dawn
danced too, and swirled its answer:
An eddying joyous unknowing.

I asked the sheer silence
how to pray,
and it answered,
in silence.

Gabby Dean 2010

The image is of seaweed-eating sheep on the beach on North Ronaldsay. Why this image?  The blending of the sea and sky and sand and water colour wash of shades... It is impossible not to hear the sheer silence, impossible not to pray in this place.  

The dark blooms and sings

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is travelled by dark feet and dark wings.

Wendell Berry from Farming: a Handbook

The image is of black cockatoos swarming and screaming in early autumn, Perth 2010, excited at the prospect of the coming cooler weather.

The Place of Dangerous Clarity

Beware

when you pass through a gate of quiet

and enter into a place of stillness.

Know you are at risk,

that you never re-emerge unscathed. Never!

You may return fierce and hungry for justice, a passionate lover, a

surprise to yourself, a risk taker, seen as a trouble maker. You may

emerge a seeker

seeking ever to open to each moment's invitation.

You may be invited to be generous with what you most cling

to, bold in ways you have never been,

dared to take that step you feared the most,

speak out your truth and have it prized or criticised,

live your life the way you have always wanted to

and never dared, say yes to being you.

Know that place of stillness grows an inner trust

and becomes in time a place of dangerous clarity.

Beware!

Noel Davis

Campfire of the Heart

Photos were taken at the top of jagged cliffs near the Tomb of Eagles, a chambered cairn, on South Ronaldsay, Orkney. Breathtaking views, and giving a vivid picture of life and death on the edge of the world.  Edge places are, for me, places of dangerous clarity, but I suspect I haven't made more than the most elementary steps into that danger or that clarity. 

A Marvellous Hidden Smile

Your smile lights the clouds and drenches all the earth
with warmth and love and laughter.
I was with you at the beginning of the world
And delighted in you as you delighted in me.
Let me delight today in the wisdom I find in all of creation
Even those I don't expect.
Let me delight today the warmth and love and laughter in all creation.
Gabrielle Dean 2011

(A marvellous hidden smile is an expression Esther De Waal has used about God, to counter ideas of a solemn disapproving God. John O'Donohue says that 'prayer should be a wild dance of the heart')




These images were taken on the way from Inverness to Fort William. A constant delight in Scotland is the way the sun will alight on one mountain among the many stacked in front and behind, bathing it in gold and silver and leaving the others in darkness. As if that very mountain, at that very time has been chosen to 'shine as a light in the world to the glory of God'. Or that very mountain has decided that very day to stand in the Light.